Book Review: Tracing Technologies: Prisoners’ Views in the Era of CSI
| Author | Simon A Cole |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663913502278c |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
HELENA MACHADO AND BARBARA PRAINSACK, Tracing Technologies: Prisoners’ Views in
the Era of CSI. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, pp. 209 þxix, ISBN 9781409430742, £55 (hbk).
An increasing amount of attention is being paid to forensic identification technologies,
especially DNA profiling. This 25-year-old technology is extremely powerful, and its
effects on criminal justice, surveillance, privacy, and biological citizenship seem only
to be beginning to be felt. Despite this increase in scholarly attention, as Helena
Machado and Barbara Prainsack note in their new book Tracing Technologies, the scho-
larly literature tends to be written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. They
note (p. 14) that there is no book on this subject written from the particular perspective of
a stakeholder group.
Machado and Prainsack have chosen what might come as a surprising stakeholder
group from which to address new developments in forensic identification technologies.
Instead of seeking the perspectives of lawyers, judges, jurors, police, forensic scientists,
policy makers, or the general public, they offer the perspective of prison inmates. They
acknowledge that it is unusual to ‘treat ...convicts as stake holders’ (p. 160). However,
drawing on science and technology studies, they argue that prisoners have ‘professional
expertise’ on forensic identification that ought not ‘be subordinated to, or ignored at the
cost of, the expertise of other experts’ (p. 160).
This innovative approach to gaining a perspective on new developments in forensic
identification technologies was pioneered by Prainsack (with Martin Kitzberger) in an
in-depth interview study of Austrian prisoners. The study design was then largely repli-
cated by Machado (with Felipe Santos and Diana Miranda) in a study of Portuguese pris-
oners. In Tracing Technologies, Machado and Prainsack have combined these data sets,
offering a fuller discussion of a variety of ethical, policy, and social issues raised by new
developments in forensic identification technologies, as well as a comparative dimension
across the two countries. The first two chapters give background on Austria and Portugal,
respectively. The next five chapters discuss the interview data comparatively. There is a
foreword by Troy Duster and an afterword by Robin Williams. The Austrian and Portu-
guese prisoners differed in interesting ways that, Machado and Prainsack suggest,
reflected national cultures and the contingent histories of the development of forensic
identification technologies in the two countries. At the same time, they were more sim-
ilar than different, perhaps speaking to the ‘global imagery of criminal investigation,
conveyed by blockbuster television crime series’ (p. 162).
Aside from all being male (p. 12), the prisoners interviewed were a heterogeneous
group, in terms ofage, race, and class, with diverse opinions, even withinthe two national
populations. Some claimed to be innocent, others admitted their guilt; some considered
themselves careercriminals, others consideredthemselves essentially ordinaryindividuals
who had committedcriminal acts under contingent circumstance; some held factually erro-
neous beliefs, others displayed astute understandings of forensic technology; some sup-
ported the legal authority of the state, others championed individual resistance to the
law; some were essentialists, othersheld more ‘social’ views of criminalbehavior. In short,
forensic identification technologies in prisoners’ imaginations were not simple, stable
objects, buta messy ‘cultural imaginary’(p. 17). Despite this heterogeneityand messiness,
Book Reviews 593
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